Doing well

On her way

Elon talks
MSFC delivers.

Swing around the Moon then use its gravity to slingshot the astronauts back home. There's no Lunar Lander on this mission.

And it's not nearly as dangerous as Apollo 8 was: Apollo 8 entered lunar orbit without a LM; if the SPS engine had failed, Borman, Anders, and Lovell would have had no backup ride home.

Artemis II, by contrast, never leaves a free-return trajectory, so unless something goes seriously wrong with the TLI burn, such that it doesn't put them on a free-return, they won't need a backup ride home (and if that were to happen, a backup ride home probably wouldn't be of any help).

are they gonna land on the moon or are they just gonna go around the moon before starting more missions where the astronaunts finally land on the moon since the 1970s

Artemis II is a lunar flyby. Artemis III next year will stay in Earth orbit and test the lunar lander and EVA suits. The first landing is slated to be with Artemis IV in early 2028, followed by Artemis V late in the year.

Come to think of it, they presumably chose "Artemis" as a counterpart to "Apollo" (as the namesake Greek deities were twin siblings), but then it's odd that they're numbering the missions with Roman numerals this time when Apollo missions used Arabic numerals.

I learned today that they're not even going to land on the moon. So disappointing.

“There’s nothing routine about going to the moon.”
-Tom Hanks, Apollo 13 movie

Everything has had to be reinvented. This isn’t reflying old tested hardware. An all up mission with a landing would probably be suicidal. This is exciting. They’ll be the fastest humans and the farthest from earth beating the Apollo 13 record (with TLI done that’s a give .. they can’t NOT go that far now)

Even with the dodgy image quality, it was thrilling to see the Earth visibly receding in the view from the spacecraft.

And I love the detail that the translunar injection burn is also the Earth deorbit burn, because the trajectory will just carry them all the way around the Moon and right on track for re-entry back at Earth with no further burns needed. Orbital mechanics is nifty.

Nifty, but damned counterintuitive at times. Lots of having to go up to go down, or go down to go up. Buzz Aldrin could practically do orbital rendezvous calculations in his head, and it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

Victor Glover said Orion was actually flying more precisely than the simulator. Considering they have had more time to train for this mission than maybe any astronauts in history, I wonder if that muscle memory of the simulators is something that has to be overcome now.

Nifty, but damned counterintuitive at times. Lots of having to go up to go down, or go down to go up. Buzz Aldrin could practically do orbital rendezvous calculations in his head, and it was the subject of his doctoral dissertation.

Larry Niven featured this in The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, about humans living in a habitable gas torus orbiting a neutron star. They had a ditty, "East takes you out. Out takes you west. West takes you in. In takes you east. Port and starboard bring you back." That is, thrusting in the direction of orbital motion (east) accelerates you and raises your orbit (out), but a wider orbit has a longer period so you fall behind (west); and conversely, thrusting against orbital motion (west) decelerates you so gravity pulls you into a lower orbit, but a lower orbit is faster so you pull ahead (east). And thrusting perpendicular to the orbital plane (port or starboard) just tilts your orbit, so you eventually cross back through the plane. Reading those books repeatedly in high school/college really helped me internalize orbital mechanics.

The silence is absolutely frightening.

If the Orion spacecraft cockpit were offset by 35 degrees we'd already be on Page 10.

If the Orion spacecraft cockpit were offset by 35 degrees we'd already be on Page 10.

I was talking about the live stream itself.

There is one angle from behind Integrity looking at the Moon that reminds me of the Enterprise flying towards Andromeda.